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THERE WERE nearly always strangers at our Thanksgiving table: a lonely acquaintance who had
nowhere else to go, Johnny's college roommate, Annie's newest steady. And the soldiers. Many of
my memories are khaki-colored.

We embraced the newcomers with conversations of commonality and conviviality. We never took
photographs because we didn't want to interrupt the feast with silly smiles and stiff poses, but many
of the dinners became snapshots of memory of another time, a mix of history, personality and
politics (especially in election years).

The first Thanksgiving I remember was in 1942 as a tiny girl sitting at the table with handsome young
men in khaki who were far away from home. They were from cities with unfamiliar names --
Pittsburgh and New Orleans and Oklahoma City and a small town in Nebraska that I have long
since forgotten. Only one of them had ever been to Washington, on a high-school senior trip.

The guys joked that next year they would be dining on turkey out of a K-ration somewhere in a
foxhole, in the Pacific or in North Africa. I was too young to understand their terror, but I sensed
that it was such Thanksgivings as these they would be fighting for.

I showed them my red-white-and blue pin with the words "Remember Pearl Harbor,'' with an
enamel globe set with a real pearl. Mom brought out the gas mask and helmet issued to her as a
volunteer air-raid warden. The soldiers wanted to talk about their families gathered at distant tables,
of their sweethearts waiting back home. They ate seconds of everything, much to Mom's delight,
and but they especially liked the sweet potatoes with marshmallows. (Who didn't?) Dinner was
mellow and bittersweet, but a heavy and unspoken sadness hung over our goodbyes as the guys left
together for the walk to the streetcar line.

At our 1948 Thanksgiving, my New Deal parents gloated over the victory of Harry Truman over
Thomas E. Dewey. The celebrity stranger at the table was a freshman from George Washington
University who lived on the West Coast, too far away to go home for the short four-day holiday.
He had done volunteer work for Truman and boasted that he had "known'' that the pollsters were
wrong and that Truman would be elected. He told stories as if they were his own, as though he had
been in the president's inner circle. I particularly remember his description of Dewey's lazy
campaign. "He didn't run for president, he walked.'' We thought that was very clever.

Thanksgiving during the Truman years was khaki again. The soldiers would be shipping out this time
for Korea. There were heated discussions over the red-baiting of Joseph McCarthy and one guest
home from the University of Wisconsin sparked spirited debate when she called the senator an
embarrassment to the state. An uncle said she should be glad Joe McCarthy was fighting Commies.
My aunt quickly asked my uncle to pass the cranberry sauce and that was that.

The grimmest of all was the Thanksgiving week after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
There was nothing to talk about but the tragedy and the fear that Lyndon Johnson wouldn't be up to
the job. We were thrilled that Jack and Jackie had brought "culture'' to our city and now there was
a vulgar Texan in the White House. We didn't have guests that year and nobody had much of an
appetite for a feast. We ate anyway.

As children grew up and got the college educations their immigrant grandparents never had, the
conversations at Thanksgiving grew more sophisticated and argumentative, particularly as each new
generation produced a crop of sophomores. Fashions and politics polarized the generations, causing
all kinds of indigestion. The boys with long hair and without ties and the girls with short dresses and
without bras soon gave way to orange hair, tattoos and body piercing. The fights over Vietnam,
Watergate and the Clinton impeachment pitted cousin against cousin and aunt against uncle, but we
survived. At least until this year.

Everybody's keeping their fingers crossed over this year. More than one invited young guest voted
for Ralph Nader. If the Gore and Bush fanatics start arguing over dimpled and pregnant chads we
might not make it to the pumpkin pie. There won't be any men in uniform, but more than one guest
will no doubt express outrage on behalf of those men in khaki whose votes were thrown away in
Florida. Not all the turkeys are on Thanksgiving tables this year. So praise the L-rd and pass the
Alka-Seltzer or
Pepto-Bismol.

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